[156-161] All relations upon which the transformations, degradation, dissipation or scattering of energy depend are grouped together in a general physical theory called energetics.

NB
The essence
of Rey's
agnosticism
NB
ha-ha!

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V. I. LENIN

This theory tells us nothing about the nature of the energies under consideration, and consequently nothing about the nature of physico-chemical phenomena. It simply describes at what cost, how, and in what direction the physical or chemical change of state of a given body takes place.

Physicist-energetists assert that it is impossible to go further, that energetics provides us with a complete, necessary and sufficient explanation of material phenomena, i.e., the sum total of all those relations upon which they depend. To lend greater objectivity to their view, some even elevate energy into a kind of substance, which is supposedly the true material substance, the real acting cause of all our sensations, the form according to which we must construct our conception of nature.

Energy here replaces the corpuscles of atomistic theories. It plays the same role and possesses being of the same kind: it is the basis of things, their ultimate nature, the absolute...

Mechanists, on the contrary, assert that it is possible to go further. Energetics remains, in their view, as it were on the surface of things, and its laws must either be reduced to other, deeper laws, or in any case supplement them, presupposing them in their foundation.

To the mechanistic school belong, as has already been said, the vast majority of physicists and in particular experimental physicists, to whom physics owes its latest successes.

Adherents of this school criticize, first and foremost, the concept of energy and show that it cannot be elevated, as some do, into some kind of physical or metaphysical essence.

NB.
Further*, than
materially
interpreted (p. 157)
energetics!
NB
this amusing
"positivist"
Mechanists
versus energetics.
* - Further. Ed.

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